How to parse a html document?

Question

I am trying to parse an html document that I load from a url over the internet. The html is not well formed but thats ok. The problem is the document builder throws an exception because the document is not well formed.
Can I parse a html document using the document builder?
Please note that I set validating to false and the parse still has a fatal errror saying <meta> tag must have a corresponding </meta> tag.
I am using code like the following.....
DocumentBuilderfactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
factory.setValidating(false);
DocumentBuilder db = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
doc = db.parse(urlString);

Answer 1

The html is not well formed but thats ok.No, it isn't.
"Validation" means checking that the XML conforms to a schema or a DTD. Don't confuse that with checking whether the XML is well-formed, which means whether it follows the basic rules of XML like opening tags have to have matching closing tags. Which is what your message is telling you -- your file isn't well-formed XML.
So sure, you can parse HTML or anything else with an XML parser, just be prepared to be told it isn't well-formed XML.
If you want to clean up HTML so that it's well-formed XML, there are products like HTMLTidy and JTidy that will do that for you.